Sunday, March 18, 2018

Now, Alison Gopnik joins those who have taken Steven Pinker
to task for the distortions and confusions in his book Enlightenment Now. However much you want to buy Pinker’s
fascination with gauzy ideals like reason and humanity, he is wrong to blame an optimism deficit for the fact that people are not lining up to become atheists. In truth, people have paid a price for progress.

Gopnik places it on the Enlightenment’s account. For my part
I prefer to say, as I have long said, that the Industrial Revolution produced the social turmoil and dislocations. Transformations in the way nations
produced goods and services, added to advances in transportation and
communication broke communities, causing a loss of social capital and a
pervasive anomie.

Gopnik does not use the terms. Yet, she grasps the problem
in an example. She shows what happens when she, a scientist, tries to encourage
young women to enter her field. They all understood that that career path will detach them from home and hearth, from family
and community. If I wanted to be churlish I would add that these functioning
small town communities barely exist anymore, but I will leave that for another day.

She writes:

The
young woman replies, “That sounds fantastic! But there’s just one thing. I love
this town. I have a boyfriend who also wants to be a scientist, and I’d like to
get married and have a bunch of kids here soon. My parents are looking forward
so much to being grandparents, and my own grandparents need me to look after
them. My family and friends are all nearby, and I’d like my kids to live in my
community and take part in the same traditions I grew up with. Can I do that
and be a scientist too?”

She continues:

The
honest answer? “If you join us, the chances are very slim that you’ll end up
living in your hometown. You’ll move around from place to place unpredictably,
from college to graduate school to postdoc research to professorship, until
you’re 40 or so. You’ll be separated from your partner for long stretches of
time. You’ll have to wait to have kids, and you may not have them at all. If
you do, they almost certainly won’t be able to grow up with their grandparents.
But there’s always Skype.”

To be more honest, we would note that this scenario has been
generated by the advent of contemporary feminism. It assumes that the young
woman wants to have a career equal to that of her husband and that she will
willingly risking losing domestic harmony and children in order to follow that
rainbow.

Gopnik is brutally honest. And it’s well and good that young
women hear the price of having a career just like a man. I would have preferred that she identify feminist theory as one of the causes of the pervasive social
anomie.

From there she continues to critique Pinker’s book:

The
weakness of the book is that it doesn’t seriously consider the second part of
the conversation—the human values that the young woman from the small town
talks about. Our local, particular connections to just one specific family,
community, place, or tradition can seem irrational. Why stay in one town
instead of chasing better opportunities? Why feel compelled to sacrifice your
own well-being to care for your profoundly disabled child or fragile, dying
grandparent, when you would never do the same for a stranger? And yet,
psychologically and philosophically, those attachments are as central to human
life as the individualist, rationalist, universalist values of classic
Enlightenment utilitarianism. If the case for reason, science, humanism, and
progress is really going to be convincing—if it’s going to amount to more than
preaching to the choir—it will have to speak to a wider spectrum of listeners,
a more inclusive conception of flourishing, a broader palette of values.

One understands that serious intellectuals feel obliged to
use awkward locutions like “a more inclusive conception of flourishing,” but
Gopnik is really concerned about the social anomie produced by rapid
industrialization. I think that she is arguing, correctly, that Enlightenment idealism has failed to provide the moral basis for new forms of community, new ways to solidify community ties.

Where Pinker believes that people are simply blinded by
their own pessimism—a theory debunked in other places, and even on this blog—Gopnik
suggests that if people feel pessimistic perhaps they are reacting to something
that Pinker ignores. Rather than address the problem, Pinker blames a few
convenient scapegoats:

But if
things are so much better, why do they feel, for so many people, so much worse?
Why don’t people experience the progress that Pinker describes? Pinker doesn’t
spend much time focusing on this question, and he gets a little tetchy when he
does. Skepticism
about Enlightenment values, in his view, comes from leftist humanities
professors and highbrow-magazine editors who have read too much Nietzsche, or
from theocrats on the right.

Pinker recommends that we all identify as members of the human species. Yet, this detaches us from social organizations. Humanity is not a social
group. It does not have rules for entry and rules that cause expulsion. Being a
member of the human species is a biological fact, but it does not confer group
membership:

Pinker’s
graphs, and the utilitarian moral views that accompany and underlie them, are
explicitly about the welfare of humanity as a whole. But values are rooted in
emotion and experience as well as reason, in the local as well as the universal.

What does it mean to belong to a group? Gopnik explains her
reasoning:

In most
mammals, a “tend and befriend” brain system—which involves the neurotransmitter
oxytocin, among others—plays an important role in the bonding between mothers
and babies. In humans, with our distinctive capacity for cooperation, this
system of attachment has been expanded to apply to a much broader range of
relationships, from pair-bonded partners to friends and collaborators.

Of course, to have a community you cannot keep it all in the
family. Communities are alliances between families. Moreover, you cannot have a
community that interacts with other communities if you see them all as
dangerous strangers. The thought, for the record, comes to us from the Book of
Leviticus and the Gospels—it’s presented as the injunction to befriend
strangers and to love you enemy.

Anyway, Gopnik suggests:

In
fact, the economist Robert Frank and the philosopher Kim Sterelny have proposed
exactly the opposite view. The feelings that go with attachment—such as love,
trust, and loyalty—allow people who have different capacities and clashing
short-term interests to cooperate in a way that benefits everyone in the long
run. Parents versus children, wives versus husbands, hunters versus
gatherers—all of these relationships inevitably involve tension and conflict.
Rationality and contractual negotiation alone can’t resolve the differences
that arise. If individuals all just pursue their own interests, even in
coordination with others, they may end up worse off. But emotions can help.
Sterelny argues that attachments act as “commitment mechanisms.” They ensure
that partners won’t just walk out of an argument or renege on an agreement when
it becomes inconvenient.

In other words, it’s not just about oxytocin and empathy. It’s
about rules and precepts, ethical principles, the sort that have been taught by
religions. But that do not belong to the notably atheistic Enlightenment.

In the absence of religion we have far more difficulty
dealing with the social dislocations caused by the Industrial Revolution. The
more detached we feel the more we will be drawn to cults… now called tribes.

In Gopnik's words:

But
scientific as well as intuitive evidence suggests that tribalism can be
seductive when people feel that their local connections are under threat. At
the same time, the Enlightenment emphasis on the autonomous, rational
individual can also lead to alienation and isolation, which make tribalist
mythology all the more appealing.

Perhaps you were thinking that it couldn’t get any crazier?
You were wrong. On the British side of the pond, transgender activism has
provoked a feminist reaction. Transgenderists want to be able to swim in swimming
pools that only allow members of one sex. Normally, this has meant, one's biological sex. In our brave new world transgenderists want it to include anyone who has identified as a member of their chosen sex. Evidently, this has seemed to many people to attack one-sex only swimming pools. One can only imagine how Britain's large Muslim population is going to greet this.

Anyway, feminists are now protesting against the transgenderists. They want to
bring back sexual segregation.

How are they protesting? Simple: they are declaring themselves to
be male identified, are swimming in male-only pools, are changing in male only
lockers and are going topless. Since men never wear tops to their swimsuits,
ergo.

First
transgender activists made a splash when men identifying as female invaded the
women-only pond on Hampstead Heath.

Now
feminists have hit back by attending a men-only swimming session in protest
over proposals that would make it easier for people to change gender.

Amy Desir,
30 – one of two women to gain access to the South London pool
last Friday – caused particular consternation by wearing just trunks and a pink
swimming cap.

Another
woman, who would only give her name as Hannah because she is afraid of
reprisals from trans activists, told staff at Dulwich Leisure Centre that they
had every right to join the session because they ‘identified as male’.

Both women used the male changing rooms before joining around 20 men in the
25-metre pool. Ms Desir, a mother of two from Luton, said: ‘We are doing it to
highlight the ridiculous and dangerous move towards self-identification.

‘We are
clearly not men but by saying we are, we were allowed to join in men-only
activities.’…

Hannah, 39, a former civil servant, was accompanied by her husband David, 46,
an accountant. She said: ‘I’ve never been an activist and I’m incredibly
nervous about doing this but the issue prompted me to take action. It is about
safety and dignity – people have a right to segregated areas. It is not enough
to say I am a man and use male changing rooms or vice versa.’

For our further edification the Daily Mail provides a
picture of Amy Desir in her swimsuit— her towel strategically placed to preserve her
modesty.

Saturday, March 17, 2018

The problem of Muslim refugees in Germany is so bad that it
has become impossible to ignore. Or perhaps, now that Angela Merkel has escaped
political oblivion, it’s a good time to discuss it.

The New York Times account of the situation in the German
city of Essen is compelling, fair and balanced. Naturally, it’s about food, in
particular, about feeding the migrant population. After all, the German word Essen means: to eat.

Before looking at the story, I would note, and I would
emphasize, that such stories never ask what the migrants are contributing to
their host countries. Everyone seems to have accepted that the migrants cannot
contribute anything. This makes them parasites, and it explains the chagrin of
those German citizens whose labor is paying to feed them. I will not emphasize the fact that the migrants are all Muslim and that news stories always neglect this salient fact. You know this already.

Another part of the problem is that these migrants do not
have any manners. It’s bad enough that they are bringing a crime wave to their
host countries. As they overwhelm the resources of the local food
bank, they do not even know how to queue up. As you know, queuing up is basic,
one would say, essential to civilization, especially in places like Great
Britain. People who refuse to queue up, to take their turn and to contribute
fairly should not expect to be well treated.

The Times reports on the situation:

Jörg
Sartor does not like to turn newcomers away from his food bank, especially
single mothers like the young Syrian woman with her 5-year-old son who had
waited outside since before dawn.

But
rules are rules. And for the moment, it is Germans only.

“Come
here,” said Mr. Sartor, waving the boy over. Mr. Sartor disappeared into a
storage room and re-emerged with a wooden toy. Then the boy and his mother were
shown the door, which for the past two weeks has had five letters scrawled
across the outside: “Nazis.”

The
decision of one food bank in the western city of Essen to stop signing up more
foreigners after migrants gradually became the majority of its users has
prompted a storm of reaction in Essen, a former coal town in Germany’s rust
belt, and across the country. Even Chancellor Angela Merkel weighed in: “You
shouldn’t categorize people like this.”

But the
controversy has highlighted an uncomfortable reality: Three years after Germany
welcomed more than a million refugees, much of the burden of
integrating the newcomers has fallen on the poorest, whose neighborhoods have
changed and who have to compete for subsidized apartments, school places and,
in the case of the food bank, a free meal.

Ask any
of the Germans lined up outside the former water tower that houses the food
bank one recent morning and they will call Mr. Sartor a “people’s hero.”

“He
stands up for us,” said Peggy Lohse, 36, a single mother of three.

Until
recently, groups of young migrant men had sometimes elbowed their way to the
front of the line, Ms. Lohse recalled. She went home empty-handed more than
once. Some older women were so intimidated that they stopped coming altogether,
she said.

It is hard to imagine that Frau Merkel is still incapable of
accepting that she made a gigantic mistake, one that has seriously
damaged her country. And yet, it’s true.

Many of the Essen migrants are Syrian. They have affected
the character of the city:

Essen, a
city of 600,000 people, has seen its Syrian community grow to nearly 11,000
from 1,300 in 2015, said Peter Renzel, who is in charge of social policy at
City Hall. Most of them live in the working-class districts of the north.

And also:

The
image of a line in which some wait their turn and others unfairly push to the
front is a familiar one for Karlheinz Endruschat, a local Social Democrat, who
represents the northern district of Altenessen.

Apartments
have become scarcer. Schools report that nine out of 10 of their students are
non-German. Some German residents feel alienated by the number of newcomers.

“There
are times when you walk down the street and you are in the minority,” Mr.
Endruschat said.

Until
three years ago, roughly one in three food bank users were foreigners, he said.
By last November, it was three in four.

For the record, the Social Democrats are the German version
of our progressive parties.

Migrants notwithstanding, the German economy is forging
ahead. It even has a budget surplus:

The
nationwide head of the charity, Jochen Brühl, said the debate currently
animating the country was largely missing the point. Germany is Europe’s
richest country and has a budget surplus of more than 40 billion euros ($55
billion), he pointed out.

“The
whole country is up in arms about this one little food bank in Essen,” he said,
“when the real scandal is that in this rich country we have this kind of
poverty.”

American institutions of higher learning increasingly
function within an ideological bubble. When it comes to the humanities and
social sciences they have given up the pretense of teaching students and
have embraced a more radical agenda. They want to produce waves of social
justice warriors. The junior Red Guards who walked out of school a few days ago are now readying themselves to join the march.

Of course, professors and college presidents are so enthralled with their own great ideas
that they pay no attention to how it all looks to the public at large.
Increasingly, the public is looking askance at institutions that have lost
their mission and have become tools of radical leftist ideologues.

Reputation matters. It matters even for institutions of
higher education. As more colleges and universities close and as other schools
eliminate majors that students no longer consider to be worth the time and
expense, a sea change is under way. Perhaps slowly, but surely.

The Washington Times reports the story and adds some remarks
about the way college presidents see their current condition:

Soaring
tuition costs, degrees of dubious value and nonstop student activism have combined
to bring public confidence in the ivory tower tumbling down.

Even
college and university presidents acknowledge that the country is becoming
disillusioned with higher education. In a recent survey conducted by Inside Higher Ed and Gallup, 51 percent
of institution leaders said the 2016 election “exposed that academe is
disconnected from much of American society.”

The
erosion of higher education’s brand comes as no surprise to Cornell Law
School professor William A.
Jacobson. He said the public’s negative perception of academia reflects the
“reality of left-wing bias disconnected from American society.”

“Particularly
in the humanities and social sciences, many faculty view political activism and
indoctrination as a core part of their academic mission,” said Mr. Jacobson,
who runs the Legal Insurrection blog. “While they may have the academic freedom to do so,
there is a price to pay for the higher educational system.”

When
asked to assess which factors are responsible for the negative view of higher
education, 86 percent of college and university presidents cited the perception
of liberal bias on campus.

Let us be clear. The problem is not liberal bias. The problem
is radical leftist bias. Liberal used to mean open minded, willing to discuss
ideas freely. The current wave of campus repression is aimed at shutting down
debate and discussion. And in punishing anyone who would dare offering a discordant opinion.

As for the question of preparing students for careers, the
college presidents have a point:

Ninety-eight
percent of college presidents said concerns about affordability and student
debt are factors contributing to higher education’s image problem, and 95
percent pointed to concerns about whether college education adequately prepares
students for careers.

As for their point, it ought to be clear that the more these
institutions teach the art of protest and the virtue of fighting for social
justice, the less their students will be prepared to work in the real world. If
a student walks into a job interview with a resume filled with courses in
social justice and culture warfare, in ethnic studies and the Marxist fairy tales
of the Frankfurt school, any hiring officer will understand immediately that
this young person has been so thoroughly deformed, mentally, that he or she
will not be capable of showing the requisite loyalty to the company or even
to do a creditable job. It's not just ideas that have been drummed out of them. They have also overcome their work ethic. And they certainly do not believe in any jobs that would create wealth. If the job involves redistributing wealth that someone else has earned, they might be on board. After all, it assuages the guilt they feel over their white privilege.

Friday, March 16, 2018

Arthur Brooks is relinquishing his post as president of the
American Enterprise Institute. Having led the conservative think tank for ten
years he has decided that it’s time to hand over the baton.

To announce his upcoming departure he offered some thoughts
on the state of American intellectual life. Obviously, it is bad. It is very
bad. We all know, because we see examples of it every day, that far too many
American universities have become indoctrination mills, force-feeding students
with a single correct opinion, punishing or silencing those who think
differently. Increasingly, media outlets have joined the dumbed-down chorus.

One of
the great attractions of
tribalism is that you don’t actually have to think very much. All you need to
know on any given subject is which side you’re on. You pick up signals from
everyone around you, you slowly winnow your acquaintances to those who will
reinforce your worldview, a tribal leader calls the shots, and everything slips
into place. After a while, your immersion in tribal loyalty makes the
activities of another tribe not just alien but close to incomprehensible. It
has been noticed, for example, that primitive tribes can sometimes call their
members simply “people” while describing others as some kind of alien. So the
word Inuit means
people, but a rival indigenous people, the Ojibwe, call them Eskimos, which,
according to lore, means “eaters of raw meat.”

Obviously, this refers to those who direct the marketplace
of ideas. The worlds of science and technology seem, for now, immune to the
lure of tribalism. We face the spectacle of universities and even high schools
teaching students how not to think, but how to emote and how to identify as a
member of a tribe. Effectively, we saw evidence of it in the student protest
marches against guns these last days and weeks.

If there is only one correct opinion, then you need not
question or challenge your own. You must accept the tribe’s dogmatic beliefs, unthinkingly.

Brooks expresses it thusly:

… the
competition of ideas is under attack. Many would rather shut down debate than
participate in it. Politicians from both parties try to discredit their
opponents with name-calling and ad hominem attacks. On too many college
campuses, people with the “wrong” viewpoints and ideas are unwelcome. Much of
the mass media has become polarized, meaning readers and viewers on the right
and left are never challenged in their conviction that the other side is made
up of knaves and fools.

Part of
this stance is pragmatic—no one has ever been insulted into agreement. Further,
we need opposing viewpoints to challenge our own. If we’re wrong, the best way
to learn it is through challenges from our friends on the other side of the
issue.

Why is this awful? If you only care about knowing what you must believe in order to remain a
member ofyour tribe, you will lose the
habit of compromise and the habit of negotiation. If you do not know how to consider
different points of view on a political or cultural topic and do not
know how to find common ground with an opponent and do not know to
engage in the give and take of negotiation, what will you do when you are
sitting around with your friends, trying to decide where to go for dinner or
which movie to see?

If you do not know how to negotiate, you will turn any
disagreement into open warfare or high drama. We practice negotiation every day in our
exchanges and transactions with friend and foe alike. Either you know how to do
it or you do not. If you learn in college that you must never compromise or
negotiate, you will be ill equipped to conduct any meaningful relationships.

Anyway, our young American intellectuals, having been
disembarrassed of their ability to exercise their rational faculties have been
ranting and raving about bigotry, all the while defending a bigot like Louis
Farrakhan. And let’s not forget the eight year tenure of Jeremiah Wright’s protégé
in the White House. Did you notice that throughout the Obama years, any
criticism or even questioning of the Savior would cause you to be shunned from
polite society?

The Obama years seriously damaged Democratic debate because any
criticism of Obama counted as blasphemy. Today, any praise of Trump similarly
counts as blasphemy. If you were wondering why Gary Cohn resigned from the
White House, perhaps the tariff policy played a part, but, if I were to
speculate, I would suggest that the weight of public opinion in the higher
reaches of New York society pressured him out. How did it pressure him: by telling
him, his wife, his friends and family that he was colluding with Hitler. After
a while, it gets to you.

Brooks makes another salient point, namely that the culture
has been so completely flooded with bad ideas that they have driven out good
ideas. I had not heard this before and I find it very useful. He compares it to
Gresham’s law, whereby bad money drives out good, that is, people are
more likely to keep bad money in circulation and to keep good money for themselves:

Another
threat to the world of ideas is arguably even more insidious: mediocrity
through trivialization, largely from misuse of new media. To understand this,
remember Gresham’s law: “Bad money drives out good.” If one form of currency is
inherently more valuable than another in circulation, the better one will be
hoarded and thus disappear.

Famous
academics spend big parts of their days trading insults on Twitter . Respected journalists
who suppress their own biases in their formal reporting show no such restraint
on social media, hurting their and their organizations’ reputations. When
half-baked 280-character opinions and tiny hits of click-fueled dopamine
displace one’s hard-earned training and vocation, it’s a lousy trade.

If you add this to the point about tribalism, you arrive at
the conclusion that the American mind is being dumbed down.

Brooks suggests that social media competition for clicks
contributes massively to this dumbing down. Clickbait must be short, pithy and shocking. It need not be reasoned or even well written. It need but engage your mind... like a train wreck. Perhaps more important, it is never
really edited.

Imagine that in the past, editors selected what was worth
reading and what was worth ignoring. The role of these gatekeepers has
diminished with the blogosphere and the twitterverse. Thus, the free market in
ideas has become something of a free-for-all, where quality does not
necessarily rise to the top. If quality involves thoughtful arguments written
in pellucid prose, then the new free-for-all market makes it far more difficult to publish, if not to find such work.

Looking for an immediate stimulus, especially one that
affirms your belief and that makes you feel like a member of the right tribe,
does not correlate with serious thought or good writing.

Of course, it would be wonderful if the custodians of
serious thought and good writing were still at working. In large part
they are not. Academic intellectuals, like those Brooks refers to, have often
been lured into twitter feuds, the better to express their deep feelings. It
would be nice to think that these people are our best and brightest, but, given today’s academic world, they are more often been hired for their
ideological conformity or to fill a diversity quota. The destitution of the
American academy has produced a situation where serious thought has been exiled…
to where, we would like to know?

And this impacts the world of the media and publishing. To
some extent serious intellectuals are still writing and still being published.
And yet, the media requires clickbait and twitter feuds to keep itself alive.
Even if leftist media did not want to cover the Trump administration fairly,
its readers would simply tune out. Their minds have been so completely taken
over by leftist dogma that they will get literally ill if they hear a
discouraging word.

And one can only wonder whether the keepers of the media
flame are the best and the brightest. In the past, careers in journalism conferred
high prestige. Is that any longer the case? How many young intellectuals avoid
a career in an industry that seems to be like a sinking ocean liner? How many of those who do join are capable
of recognizing serious thought and excellent writing? In part, they judge work
by the criteria imposed by identity politics. In larger part, they do not know
any better.

Thursday, March 15, 2018

We would all have understood if the girl just needed to get
away from it all. Losing her one great chance at the brass ring, and losing to
Donald Trump must have taxed her delicate psyche. After all, she made the
ultimate sacrifice, she married Bill Clinton. And she stayed married to Bill
Clinton. Surely, the American people owed her the presidency.

So, we would have understood if she needed a vacation. We
would have been happy to see her touring India with her girlfriend. And yet,
Hillary Clinton, being Hillary Clinton, could not keep her foot out of her
mouth. And, she could not keep her balance while walking down a flight of
stairs. That too is not surprising.

And, she cannot stop complaining about the election. Shouldn’t
someone run a tape through her headphones, with the message: What difference at
this point does it make?

Anyway, Hillary managed to tell an audience in India that
she lost the election because Republican women are tools of the patriarchy. But, why did this make news? True believing feminists have always
divided their sex according to ideological commitment. A woman who accepted
feminist ideology was thinking for herself. A woman who was not doing so—and worse
yet, was voting Republican—was a tool of the patriarchy.

Hillary being Hillary she could not restrain herself from
offering her own back-of-the-envelope political analysis. People in diverse and
advanced states voted for her. The rubes and the deplorables voted for the
Donald. After all, places like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut… states
that are in serious decline because of stifling taxation, voted for her.

Meaning what exactly? True
enough, New York City is filled with the very rich and the very poor. No middle
ground there. Those who are in high tech or finance are holding up the city.
The poor are being pushed out. New York City is a living monument to income
inequality.

As is, for that matter, California. It’s the worst state for
business, the worst state for taxes, the worst state for qualify of life. It
has gross income inequality. Its major cities sport disgusting and dangerous
homeless encampments. It is overrun by illegal immigrants who are not
contributing to the state’s prosperity.

Better yet, this monument to income inequality and squalor
gave Hillary the entirety of her vote advantage. The Trump campaign figured out
that it did not matter how many votes they lost by in California. So, they didn’t
bother to campaign there. Hillary Clinton ran up the vote and lost the
election. It’s enough to restore your faith in God.

To Hillary’s mind, California is the most diverse and
dynamic place in the country. In truth, it is seeing a grand exodus of
businesses. Most of them are moving to places that voted for Trump. How can
Hillary explain that? Don’t hold your breath. Being Hillary means never having
to explain anything.

Today, we have it on the authority of the Dallas Business Journal (via Maggie’s Farm) that 9,000 businesses have debarked from California
over the past seven years… mostly to Texas.

Here is the story:

Roughly
9,000 California companies moved their headquarters or diverted projects to
out-of-state locations in the last seven years, and Dallas-Fort Worth has been
a prime beneficiary of the Golden State’s “hostile” business environment.

That’s
the conclusion of study by Joseph
Vranich, a site selection consultant and president of Irvine,
California-based Spectrum Location Solutions.

Of the
9,000 businesses that he estimates disinvested in California, some relocated
completely while others kept their headquarters in California but targeted
out-of-state locations for expansions, Vranich found. The report did not count
instances of companies opening a new out-of-state facility to tap a growing
market, an act unrelated to California’s business environment.

As a for instance, take Toyota Motors:

Japanese
automaker Toyota, which is consolidating its North American headquarters in
Plano over the next couple of years, is one of those companies. The company is
leaving Torrance, California, and two other locations to set up shop in Plano,
where it will employ 4,000.

It’s
typical for companies leaving California to experience operating cost savings
of 20 up to 35 percent, Vranich said. He said in an email to the Dallas Business Journal that he
considers the results of the seven-year, 378-page study “astonishing.”

“I even
wonder if some kind of ‘business migration history’ has been made,” Vranich
wrote in his note.

While business is leaving, illegal immigrants are arriving.
While the state government makes it increasingly difficult to do business, it
does everything it can to retain illegal immigrants. No sanctuary for business.
Sanctuary for people who have no business being there.

I don’t know about you, but I will not miss Rex Tillerson.
By now the people who have had nothing good to say about him have come out from
under their rocks to praise him… and to declare that he did not deserve to be
fired by Tweet. Not one of them can resist the chance to spin a story to make
Trump look bad.

Of course, we do not really know whether he was fired by
Tweet. We can hypothesize that he was given the opportunity to resign and to say that he wanted to spend
more time with his family. If he refused the offer, the president would have
had no other option but to fire him.

By all appearances, Tillerson proved to be an incompetent
manager at the State Department. Worse yet, he was pursuing his own private
foreign policy, a policy that was at variance with the administration’s policy.

It is nearly impossible to understand how Tillerson thought
he had the authority to do as he pleased in his work with foreign governments,
but apparently he did. So much for the notion that Donald Trump is some kind of
autocrat. In truth, Trump seems to allow his cabinet appointees some
considerable latitude in doing their jobs. He does not allow them to go off on
their own, to go rogue.

At the very least, it meant that Tillerson held Trump in
contempt and did not feel any need to execute administration policy. That being
the case, firing Tillerson via Tweet seems an appropriate gesture.

Tillerson had had a distinguished career as a corporate
executive. Plaudits for that. He had had experience dealing with heads of state
and had done so successfully. Plaudits for that too. Yet, he did not know very
much about foreign policy. It was his downfall. People who do not know very much about a topic
become vulnerable to the conventional wisdom. If you know nothing about a topic
and want to appear to know a lot about it—otherwise, why would you be Secretary
of State—you will most likely absorb the views that count as sophisticated and
intelligent. When it came to policy, Tillerson was
in way over his head.

Apparently, Tillerson differed with the president on
numerous foreign policy issues. Worse yet, he made his disagreements public. He
contradicted the president. He conducted policy with foreign governments on the
basis of his views, not the president’s views.

Marc Thiessen explains that Tillerson was fired for
insubordination. Especially as regards the upcoming negotiations with North
Korea. Given the need to have a functioning policy shop behind the president
when he negotiates with Kim Jong-un Tillerson had to go.

He had been on the
wrong page on North Korea. And he did not know enough about the issues to be of
any use. He was simply mouthing the tired Obama-era views. On that issue a Mike
Pompeo will be a significant upgrade. Note clearly, the issue is not merely
that Pompeo thinks about these things as Trump does. Pompeo has the depth of
understanding of the issues that will make him a true Secretary of State.
Naturally, Democrats, accompanied by a recycled grandstanding eye surgeon, will
do their best to derail the nomination. After all, they care less about the
national interest than about their electoral prospects.

Thiessen offers his thesis:

Tillerson
was completely out of step with Trump’s hard-line stance on North Korea, which
ultimately brought Kim Jong Un to the bargaining table. Instead, Tillerson’s
North Korea strategy seemed to be to beg Pyongyang for talks. Speaking at the Atlantic Council in December,
Tillerson delivered this embarrassing plea: “Let’s just meet. And we can talk
about the weather if you want. ... But can we at least sit down and see each
other face to face?” He
might as well have added: “Pretty
please, with sugar on top?”

He adds:

By
projecting weakness to Pyongyang, Tillerson was undercutting Trump’s message of
strength — and thus making war more likely. The fact that Tillerson could not
seem to grasp this or get on the same page as his commander in chief made his
continued leadership of the State Department untenable.

As I said, Thiessen's analysis is completely plausible. But then again
so is Adam Kredo's in the Washington Free Beacon. By his lights Tillerson went
rogue on the Iran nuclear deal. Kredo also adds that Tillerson failed on other
aspects of Mideast diplomacy, as in moving the American embassy to Jerusalem.

Kredo explains that Tillerson was running around the world
trying to save the Iran nuclear deal. Trump had campaigned against it. Nearly
all Republicans had declared it to be a disaster. Trump wanted out of it. Tillerson was trying to keep America in it. True, getting out of it is
like getting out of a tight parking spot, but still administration policy is
administration policy. On Iran, Tillerson went rogue:

The
abrupt firing Tuesday of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson follows months of
infighting between the State Department and White House over efforts by
Tillerson to save the Iran nuclear deal and ignore President Donald Trump's
demands that the agreement be fixed or completely scrapped by the United
States, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the situation who spoke
to the Washington Free Beacon.

In the
weeks leading up to Tillerson's departure, he had been spearheading efforts to
convince European allies to agree to a range of fixes to the nuclear deal that
would address Iran's ongoing ballistic missile program and continued nuclear
research.

While
Trump had prescribed a range of fixes that he viewed as tightening the deal's
flaws, Tillerson recently caved to European pressure to walk back these demands
and appease Tehran while preserving the deal, according to these sources. The Free Beaconfirst disclosed this tension last week in a
wide-ranging report.

White
House allies warned Tillerson's senior staff for weeks that efforts to save the
nuclear deal and balk on Trump's key demands regarding the deal could cost
Tillerson his job, a warning that became reality Tuesday when Trump fired
Tillerson by tweet.

Tillerson had been warned that he was risking his job by
pursuing his own private policy. Apparently, he persisted:

Other
White House insiders echoed this sentiment, telling the Free Beacon that Tillerson
emerged as a roadblock to Trump's foreign policy strategy.

"Tillerson
was an establishment figure, like Gary Cohn, and the president seems after a
year to be tiring of them," said one source with knowledge of the matter.
"He wants people closer to his own views. I think Tillerson's opposition
on Jerusalem was a factor: it's not just that he opposed Trump but that he
predicted violent reactions that didn't happen."

"I've
got to figure that made the president wonder why he needed more such
advice," the source said. "Same for the JCPOA and Tillerson's view
that getting out of it would be a calamity."

Apparently, Tillerson became enthralled by Obama holdovers in
the State Department. He had shown public defiance to the president. And he
undoubtedly refused to resign gracefully. Ergo….